Hellgate London - Massive Black Art Interview

April 5th, 2007, 14:41

I&#39;ve filed this under Hellgate: London but it was actually Fallout 3 that caught my eye. Art site CGSociety has an interview-cum-profile with Jason Manley (Baldur&#39;s Gate II, Vampire: Bloodlines) on his company Massive Black, which is now the largest independent concept art studio in the world. Their "break" was working on Flagship&#39;s Hellgate: London but at the very end, they mention Fallout 3 as a current project. There&#39;s absolutely no other information at all but it might be worth a read for anyone interested in the art side of the games business:

With 18 artists now working with Massive Black, and Hellgate underway, it became clear that the dream of working as a remote-based company wasn’t happening. “Working as a remote-based company is great only until you get a giant job,” says Manley. “Just try to manage a few thousand pieces of concept work and 300 models and textures and 300 or 4,000 animations using conversations on IM. It doesn’t work and it wasn’t going to.” In addition to Hellgate, the team was also working on projects for id software, Sony, Nike, Blizzard, Activision, and others.

Some literally breathtaking work—the level of detail in some of the Hellgate stuff is amazing. Playing a game, absorbed in the gameplay mechanics, you often don't take time to appreciate the art—those renders of Bodhi impressed me with how integral they are to my memories of the parts of BG2 that made it unique.

We hear 'story, story. story' all the time, but I think more of the story is told in the artwork than we realize.